(NEXSTAR) – Colorectal cancer now has the highest mortality rate of any cancer among people under 50 in the United States, a study conducted by researchers with the American Cancer Society has found.
The study, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association, used data obtained from the National Cancer Institute to analyze the rate of cancer deaths among men and women under the age of 50 between 1990 and 2023. The researchers found that mortality rates associated with some of the deadliest forms of cancer among younger Americans — lung cancer, brain cancer, breast cancer and leukemia — had actually declined. But colorectal cancer bucked the trend, leaping from “the fifth most common cancer death in the early 1990s to first in 2023,” the American Cancer Society wrote of its findings.
“We weren’t expecting colorectal cancer to rise to this level so quickly, but now it is clear that this can no longer be called an old person’s disease,” Dr. Ahmedin Jemal, the study’s senior author, said. “We must double down on research to pinpoint what is driving this tsunami of cancer in generations born since 1950.”
Overall cancer deaths among people under 50 have drastically dropped by 44% since the 1990s, in large part due to better screenings and therapies, researchers say. The number of deaths from colorectal cancer in this same group, meanwhile, had risen “by 1.1% per year since 2005,” according to an ACS press release issued last week.
The release did not detail potential reasons for this rise in colorectal cancer deaths, though a representative for the ACS told NewsNation that researchers were looking into “diet and obesity for sure.” This echoes previous findings from the ACS, as well as the opinions of medical experts who attribute at least some instances of colon cancer in young adults to “diet, decreased exercise and poor lifestyle choices like increased smoking or drinking,” Dr. Dana Hayden, a colon and rectal surgery specialist with UW Health in Madison, Wisconsin, said in 2023.
“But there are definitely some other factors that could be related to genetics, that could be related to tumor biology,” said Hayden said. “So we are trying to work very quickly to figure this out.”
The results of a study published in August 2025 also indicated a massive 50% spike in colon cancer diagnoses specifically among adults ages 45 to 49, Nexstar’s KXAN reported. But at least part of that percentage was due to a spike in diagnoses made after the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, which may have delayed patients from seeking more prompt medical opinions.
The ACS researchers behind that study, too, said there were numerous possible reasons for diagnosis rates.
“There’s a wealth of research happening in this area right now looking at all kinds of factors such as diet, family history, even early-life exposures like antibiotics,” Dr. Rajesh Shah, of Baylor Scott & White Gastroenterology, told KXAN. “There will be a lot of interesting studies coming out in the next 5-10 years to give us a better sense of this.”
A separate study on the relationship between alcohol consumption and colorectal cancer was published just this past week in the journal Cancer. Researchers with the National Health Institute, as well as those with the Universities of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Queen’s University in Belfast, found an association between long-term alcohol use and higher colorectal cancer risk.
More specifically, the researchers determined that drinkers who consumed 14 or more alcoholic beverages per week had a 25% higher risk of colorectal cancer when compared to those who drank less than one alcoholic beverage per week. Long-term drinkers also had a 95% higher risk of rectal cancer than those who virtually abstained.
The good news? The study’s limited data suggested that former drinkers who had abstained from alcohol for at least 2 years had “lower cancer risk compared with those who sustained drinking levels.”
Medical experts are also hopeful that new screening guidelines, which recently shifted the recommended starting age from 50 to 45, will catch precancerous polyps in the early stages. People with a family history of colorectal cancer, or those with certain bowel conditions, may want to be screened even earlier, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests.
“This research underscores the urgent need to protect and expand access to care, especially at a time when increasing health care premiums and cuts to prevention and screening programs threaten to reverse our progress and undo the gains we have achieved,” Lisa A. Lacasse, the president of the American Cancer Society Action Network, said of the organization’s recent findings. “We cannot afford to turn back the clock now.”
